ewcbr series re-branded (Oct 2000)

The European Workshop on CBR (EWCCBR)
series held biannually since 1993 is being re-branded as "The
European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning" (ECCBR). It was decided
(in the usual community way) at EWCBR2k that this change is name will
better reflect the true nature of ECCBR as an international conference.
ECCBR will still alternate annually with the ICCBR series. The next ECCBR
will be hosted by the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen Scotland in
2002.

ai-cbr moves to new zealand (April
2000)

Well the BIG story is that
ai-cbr has moved from cold damp UK to warm sunny New Zealand. After 10
years at the University of Salford Ian has moved to the Department of
Computer Science at the University of
Auckland and ai-cbr has moved with him. However you shouldn't see any
difference in ai-cbr except that we have launched an ai-cbr
Pacific mirror site
to complement our main US server and existing European mirror site.

Inference is acquired by eGain (March
2000)

Inference has been partnering with
eGain for a while now and eGain has taken advantage of Inference's low
stock price and obvious synergy to acquire Inference. It's still too early
to say what this will mean for our old friends but you can find out the
latest news at their respective web sites: www.inference.comwww.egain.com

k-Commerce Support Enterprise launched (October 99)

Inference ( the big US player in the CBR market) have
announced the launch of k-Commerce Support Enterprise 1.0, a scalable, Web-architected customer
service and support solution that replicates the experience of the best customer service
representatives to provide fast, accurate and consistent answers to customers. ai-cbr was
fortunate to spend a couple of days with Inference pre-release of the product and advises
you to throw away all of your preconceptions about Inference's products. k-Commerce
Enterprise is a complete re-write of their product. Textual similarity matching is greatly
improved and numeric similarity is now handled well. But, the big innovation is the
product's seamless integration with external information sources such as Lotus Notes and
Microsoft SiteServer. Check it out!

TECINNO has
decided to sponsor ai-cbr. Their sponsorship will go towards paying for our web hosting
and design expenses and will cover some of the cost of running the 4th. UK CBR Workshop this coming September. If your
organisation would like to become a sponsor of ai-cbr further information can be found here.

Inference Corp. has rebadged its CBR3 product line,
which is now called k-Commerce. This is to better position the product as both a pre an
post sales product using knowledge to support product sales and support (e-Commerce -
k-Commerce, get it?). They've also changed their logo. Check all the changes out on their new web site.

The Haley Enterprise
has decided to sponsor ai-cbr. Their sponsorship will go towards paying for our web
hosting and design expenses and will cover some of the cost of running the 4th. UK CBR Workshop this coming September. If your
organisation would like to become a sponsor of ai-cbr further information can be found here.

A full report on this important workshop along with
links to researchers web sites and downloadable papers is now available here.

We've been given a version of this state-of-the-art
CBR tool. As soon as we've had the time to get to grips with it and give it a thorough
checkout we'll be passing on our views to you all (once we've checked our comments with
the guys at tecInno). Ian had a brief look at the tool
at EWCBR4 in Dublin and it looked great. Just think of everything you'd want a CBR tool to
do and CBR-Works seems to do it - or will do in the next release. Watch this space!

The 4th UK CBR Workshop (UKCBR4) will be held at the
University of Salford on Sept. 15th 1999. The call for papers
is out now.

ai-cbr has developed an on-line searchable
bibliography of over 600 references on all aspects of case-based reasoning. You can search
within any field or choose from specific fields such as "authors",
"title" and "keywords". You can restrict the search to fall within
specified years and you can simply browse the bibliography from A-Z. You can add your own
publications to the bibliography and let us know if a reference is in correct.

The Computer Programming Editor of Amazon.com has selected "Applying Case-Based
Reasoning: techniques for enterprise systems" by Ian Watson as one of his recommendations
for January. His full review can be read here.

Inference Corp. has spun out a new subsidiary
company called Zurf Inc. Their product called ZurfRider
is a meta search engine that you can configure to use your favourite search engines.
ZurfRider uses similar clustering algorithms as Inference's CBR3 Content Navigator to sort
and organise returned hits and presents you with the opportunity to refine your search
through a conversational interface. ai-cbr has been using a demo version for two months
and finds it an excellent tool.

To help cover expenses, ai-cbr will accept
sponsorship from companies with an interest in CBR. All revenue this generates will be
used to promote Case-Based Reasoning. Sponsorship does not imply endorsement of a product
or service by ai-cbr or its employees. For further information, check the ai-cbr sponsorship page.